UEFI is not your enemy

This talk gives an overview of UEFI and the components and organisations surrounding it - intending to clarify certain topics that may have been muddled by association.

Apart from on IA64, UEFI was pretty invisible in the open source community up until the point where Microsoft announced their plans/requirements for mandating UEFI Secure Boot. While BIOS was outliving its usefulness on x86, even those hardware vendors that shifted to using UEFI "under the hood" provided BIOS emulation for backward compatibility.

This has now changed/is now changing. Some x86 systems are already shipping without legacy mode, and AArch64 (or arm64, depending on your water supply) servers will be shipping with UEFI firmware next year.

So, since the community cannot ignore UEFI, this presentation hopes to clarify the various aspects of UEFI - helping everyone hate the bit they should be hating for the right reasons, rather than bundling it all together :)

This is an updated/evolved version of the talk that was given at the 2013 UK mini Debconf and later at FOSDEM 2014.

About the author Leif Lindholm:

Leif Lindholm is employed by ARM since 2005, and now a full-time assignee into Linaro - working as the tech lead of the UEFI team in the Linaro Enterprise Group. Original author of ports of GRUB to 32-bit and 64-bit ARM, as well as UEFI Runtime Services support for the 32-bit ARM Linux kernel.